The “Combination of East and West” in the Beijing Olympic Games

Chinese people see the Beijing Olympics as an opportunity for the “combination of East and West” that will enrich both Western and Eastern culture.  Traditional Chinese culture has been incorporated into the ceremonies and landmarks of the Olympic Games in ways that are surprising.

Susan Brownell poses with John Bilmon, the leader o the team that designed the Water Cube.

Chinese Hospitality toward Guests

Above all else Chinese people see the Olympic Games as a chance to welcome the world’s peoples as their guests and show them traditional Chinese hospitality.  In doing business in China, many Westerners learn that in dealing with Chinese partners they must first have dinner and engage in small-talk before getting down to negotiations.  In China the custom is to first invite the guest to your home to build trust, and only later to try to talk through differences. The Olympic Games are China’s opportunity to return the hospitality of the other Olympic host nations who have previously invited China into their homes.  The cultural performances in the Olympic opening ceremony are like the unique foods that you receive as a special guest.  They want to feed you delicacies that are not available in your hometown. 

In China there was discontent with the Beijing segment choreographed by the famous film director Zhang Yimou for the closing ceremony in the 2004 Athens Olympics, because many Chinese felt he tried too hard to combine East and West and the final product was not “Chinese” enough.  But some people recognized that perhaps Westernized Chinese culture can be better appreciated by non-Chinese people – just as most Westerners prefer Westernized Chinese food over the more authentic versions, which may be more heavily flavored and contain things that Westerners do not usually eat.  Still other people wondered whether China should even try to appeal to Western tastes.  The heated debate about “Chinese culture” will no doubt fire up again on August 8. 

The meaning of August 8, 2008

Times have particular importance in Chinese culture.  Fortunetelling uses what is called the “eight characters” representing the year, month, day and hour of a person’s date of birth in the traditional lunar calendar.  The alignment of the universe at that moment fixes a person’s character and fate forever.  The Olympic opening ceremony will begin on the eighth evening hour of the eighth day of the eighth month of the year 2008.  “Eight” is a lucky number in Hong Kong and southern China, since the pronunciation of the Cantonese word for “eight,” baat, sounds like the word faat, which is the first character in the word faat choy, “to become wealthy.”  Although Mandarin ba and fa also sound alike, northerners (and non-superstitious southerners) complain that they had never heard that eight was a lucky number before the Beijing organizing committee started promoting the idea.  But this has not deterred thousands if not millions of people from scheduling weddings and attempting to schedule childbirths on August 8.  If August 8 was not lucky on a nationwide scale before, it is now – an “invented tradition” created by the Olympic Games.

The Symbolism of Stadiums

The opening ceremony will take place in the National Stadium, or “Bird’s Nest,” which is located in the Olympic Park.  Since ancient times, Chinese cities have been laid out on a north-south axis, which differs from the Western tradition going back to ancient Greece.  According to the principles of fengshui, auspicious power (qi) flows upward from the South - which is the most auspicious of the Four Directions.  For this reason Beijing had built the 1990 Asian Games complex on the northern end of Beijing’s north-south axis, and had been retaining the choice spot north of the Asian Games site for the Olympic Park. Now the north-south axis through the center of Beijing has the Olympic Park at its northern end and the Forbidden City at its southern end. The axis links the natural park with the man-made palace, symbolizing tian ren he yi, “humans and nature as one.”  The location of the stadium and Olympic Park on Beijing’s sacred axis should not only ensure a successful Games, but also should help channel good fortune into Beijing.

The Workers’ Stadium, built in 1959, was the first major stadium built after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949).  Its generic, Soviet-inspired architecture symbolized that China was becoming “modern.” Beginning in the 1990s, greater attention was paid to “Chinese characteristics” as part of the reaction against decades of attack on Chinese traditions.  The main stadium for the 1990 Asian Games was designed by a Chinese architect with sloping roofs that were said to be Chinese.  The stadium for the unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Olympics in 1993 was to have been designed by the famous Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei.  By 2001, when it was bidding for the 2008 Olympics, China had given up the idea that in order for the stadium to be “Chinese” the designer had to be “Chinese,” and instead held an open competition for the best architects in the world. The design for the National Stadium was awarded to a joint proposal by the Swiss firm of Herzog and De Meuron with China Architecture Design Institute. It became popularly known as the Bird’s Nest because of its unusual design of interlaced steel girders like the twigs of a bird’s nest. Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron collaborated on the design with avant-garde Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and reportedly the idea of a bird’s nest shape was his.  He had lived from 1981 to 1993 in the U.S., and his art often dealt with the breaking up “traditional Chinese” objects and reshaping the fragments into new works of art.  The Bird’s Nest was said to be reminiscent of bird’s nest soup, a Chinese delicacy that is believed to be good for the health.

Ancient Chinese Philosophy and the Ultra-Modern Water Cube

John Bilmon, Managing Director of PTW Architects, shared with me the story of how ancient Chinese philosophy got incorporated into the structure of the Water Cube, the spectacular blue swimming arena that sits across from the Bird’s Nest.  The design consortium consisted of the Australian-based PTW, China-based CCDI, and U.S.-based Arup Engineering.  At the start of the preparation for the final round presentation in the design competition, the team ran into a deadlock.  They had agreed that the building should express “water.”  But as the initial designs emerged, the two Chinese team members from CCDI became increasingly uncomfortable. 

In mainland China the thinking process usually starts with the general and moves to the specific, which is often the opposite direction from that taken in the West.  This is expressed in the Chinese way of addressing envelopes with the country first and the individual’s name last, which is opposite from the Western order.  A common Chinese way of undertaking big projects is to spend a lot of time establishing the “fundamental principles and guiding thought” before proceeding to the specifics.  The Chinese felt that the design team had not properly established its fundamental principals and they did not want to proceed any further without them.  They favored a square building and felt that the rest of the team did not fully grasp what the square means in Chinese philosophy.

Seeing that his team was at an impasse, Bilmon decided to stop the process for one week so the Chinese members could give presentations to the rest of the team about fundamental principles of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics.  After one week, Bilmon was convinced and made the decision to proceed with the square.  Its square shape and the water moat around it reflect the layout of the Forbidden City.  The Water Cube represents yin, water, and earth against the yang, fire, and heaven of the adjacent Bird’s Nest.  The avenue between the two positions humankind between the round heaven and the square earth in accord with Chinese philosophy, which is also reflected in the combination of round altars and square foundations at the Temple of Heaven.

The team proceeded to build upon this ancient philosophical foundation an ultra-modern structure of hi-tech materials and cutting-edge environmental designs, which make it 30% more energy efficient than conventional natatoriums.  The bubble pattern on the exterior was derived by mathematical formula from the structure of soap bubbles.  The process of creating the structural algorithms required that the consortium link their computers and let them run for as long as a week at a time.  Bilmon estimated that before 2002 it would not have been possible to create the design, both because the computer power would not have been enough, and because the research that they did on the internet was so important. 

The Creativity of the Future

In this way the Water Cube is a quintessential example of the combination of Eastern and Western civilization, the traditional and the modern, that is being realized on a scale in the Beijing Olympic Games that has never before been seen in world history.  It foretells of new and exciting possibilities for the future.